Mother of Storms Read Online Free Page A

she didn’t know what the plants were, she had no phrases to remember or key into the experience with, she didn’t know what the major threats to this part of the ecosystem were or who was responsible for them, and there wasn’t any spiritual significance to anything. Worse yet, she got sweaty and dirty—she’d never gone more than a day unshowered in her life, probably.
    So by suggesting the Lectrajeep, he’s looking for a fight, maybe, if he admits the truth to himself, because if they fight and then fuck to make up, it will be what he really wanted all along, and if they just fight, it will make him that much crazier for the next time. He’s beginning to wonder, a little, just how much crazier he can get.
    He’s stunned numb when she takes his hand and says, “Let’s give it a try. I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t bend enough or try to see anyone else’s point of view.”
    Jesse’s heart is thumping to be let out of his chest. “Great,” he says. “It’s about an hour’s drive out to my favorite spot if we go at a reasonably responsible speed. I’ll call my brother on the way and see if he knows anything about environmental effects yet.”
    She kisses him then, right out where anyone might see it happening. He’s crazier. Definitely crazier.
     
     
    In the seabed off the North Slope, things have been happening. There was a lot of kinetic energy in the warheads to begin with, and because Scuttlebytes got it right for once, there was also a plume of antiprotons spraying in ahead of them, and that added some energy as well.
    All that was nothing compared to the warheads themselves. When an antineutron collides with a beryllium nucleus, it annihilates one neutron, and the mutual annihilation releases around nine times the energy of a fissioning uranium atom. It also converts that nucleus to two alpha particles about as close together as you’ll ever see them. Having the same charge, they repel each other and take off in opposite directions, adding a percentage point or so to the total energy. The alpha particles, highly charged, readily “hand over” their energy to the matter they pass through, as heat, as electromagnetic radiation, and as mechanical motion caused by the heat and radiation.
    It is the destiny of all energy, eventually, to end up as heat; that’s the principle of entropy. The energy of the bomb explosions ended up as heat in the ocean bed, much of which is ice, not very far below freezing—in fact if it weren’t at ocean-bottom pressure it wouldn’t be frozen at all.
    This is ice with something more.
    One strange fact about ice, when you think about it, is that it floats. Solid butter sinks to the bottom of liquid butter, solid iron sinks to the bottom of liquid iron, solid nitrogen sinks to the bottom of liquid nitrogen
    . . but solid water floats on liquid water.
    Imagine a microscope fine enough to show you why. The water molecule is bent at an angle and try as you like, it doesn’t pack neatly. Freeze water, so that the molecules start to line up into crystals, and that sloppy packing leaves a lot of empty space—more empty space than when they were just rolling around on each other.
    Freeze water another way, and there’s so much extra space you can trap other molecules between the water molecules. That’s called a clathrate—Latin for a “cage, trellis, or grating”—and all kinds of things can be held in there.
    As when twenty-three water molecules make a cage around four methane molecules.
    There is lots of methane in the seabed. Everything that sinks down there rots, and there’s not much free oxygen. Many anaerobic decay processes release methane. Dead stuff has been rotting on the seabed for a long time—and since the last few ice ages, it’s been cold enough down there to trap the methane in clathrates. On the Arctic Ocean floor many clathrate beds are tens of meters thick and hundreds of kilometers across.
    So energy from the cram bombs goes into the seabed